Michael Scanlan

Michael Scanlan (10 November 1833-6 March 1917) was an Irish republican journalist and poet who wrote for the Irish Republic newspaper in Chicago. Scanlan was a supporter of the liberal Republican Party during the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and he later went on to work for the US State Department in Washington DC.

Biography
Michael Scanlan was born in Castlemahon, County Limerick, Ireland on 10 November 1833, and he emigrated to the United States at the age of 15 amind the Great Famine and settled in Chicago, Illinois, where he and his brothers started a candy business. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and became a journalist, writing for the Irish Republic newspaper. He framed the conflict between labor and capital as the immemorial fight between liberty and tyranny, and he likened contemporary capitalists to Southern slave drivers. During the 1860s and 1870s, he was sympathetic to Radical Reconstruction, echoing Republican ideas by denouncing President Andrew Johnson as a "man of violent passions, and of extremely limited education" and supporting the protective tariff out of the belief that free trade with Britain lowered the wages of Irish workingmen. In 1887, he was appointed chief of the Bureau of Statistics in the State Department, and he retired in 1912. He died in 1917 at the age of 84.